Trading Frenzy Sent Bithumb Crashing

The world’s largest crypto exchange went down crashing on November 12th following some trading frenzy in bitcoin and bitcoin cash the likes of which this space has never seen before.

On Bithumb alone, $6 billion was traded on that day, the exchange says, with traffic surging 500% to 2.25 – 3 Gbps, while the number of concurrent users rose by an incredible 1600 – 1700%.

Trading volumes spiked by 800 – 900% more than the average of October, all of which sent their server crashing as the traffic was “outside the predictable range.”

The outage is believed to have occurred at the peak of frenzy, when bitcoin was crashing down to $5,400 at the same time as bitcoin cash surged to $2,799.

The former, however, quickly gained $1,000 while the latter lost $1,000 at the same time, but Bithumb users were unable to react, leading to considerable losses.

Bithumb says they are to announce a compensation plan after discussions with their lawyers as the exchange feels responsible for the failure. Bithumb says:

“Bithumb operates a customer center equipped with more than 200 employees for 24 hours, 365 days a year. This is the first time that we have been working on an emergency system.

All of our Bithumb employees feel heavily responsible for this connection failure, which caused inconvenience to our members.

In order to proceed with compensation for our members, we are checking the relevant issues through customer protection centers, including law firms.

We will carry out the necessary legal and social responsibilities for this matter. As soon as the compensation plan is confirmed, we will prompt a quick announcement.

As the world’s largest virtual currency exchange, we will actively settle the pending issue with responsible attitudes.”

Global trading volumes reached a high of $23 billion on that day, with around $20 billion handled by bitcoin and bitcoin cash alone as investors begun re-evaluating the two currencies following segwit2x’s cancellation.

Bitcoin Cash surged from around $300 to a high of $2,799, while at the same time bitcoin fell from a high of $7,900 to $5,400 before the two then somewhat settled at $1,300 and $6,500 correspondingly.